The plunge in stock markets across Europe this week - after voters in France and Greece rejected austerity measures - hardly provides a positive backdrop to the biggest share issue of the year.

With more than 526 million users each day around the world, Facebook is expected to provoke a rush of would-be investors when shares go on sale in New York on May 18.

The warning by Prime Minister David Cameron that the eurozone crisis is barely halfway through means small savers in their millions will sink even more cash into the coffers of banks and building societies.

The Government guarantees this money is safe, under its Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) - to a limit of £85,000 per person, per deposit taker.

For many motorists, the past year has brought some welcome relief from the soaring increases in premiums for comprehensive cover imposed by insurers in 2010/11.

According to the AA British Insurance Premium Index, the average quote, based on the average of the five cheapest premiums, showed a 7.7% rise in the year to March 31, 2012.

While most households manage to reduce spending on food, drink and even petrol when budgets are squeezed, applying the same degree of control to energy bills can be a far more difficult task.

According to new research from comparison service uSwitch.com, nearly four million households are in debt - owing a total of £478 million - to energy suppliers.

Although the financial year of 2012/13 is only a few days old, many savers are being bombarded with cash Isas which promise a positive return.

When that happens, interest earned on savings will once again exceed the value lost to the inflation rate - a situation which has only occasionally applied since interest rates plunged in the global banking crash of 2008/09.

As house prices stagnate and even fall across many areas of Britain, fears are growing that many homeowners with interest-only mortgages could find it increasingly difficult to move as big lenders clamp down sharply on their lending criteria.

So long as house prices kept rising, interest-only mortgages were a cheap way on to the home ownership ladder, with borrowers always able to sell up and take a fat profit after paying back the loan when they moved on.

Although it took a little time for the penny to drop, Middle Britain is set to pick up the biggest tab from Chancellor George Osborne's latest Budget package.

While young, single workers on low incomes enjoy a rise in their personal allowance - the amount they can earn before they pay income tax - from £8,105 in April 2012 to £9,205 in April 2013, pensioners who have saved for years to build a private pension to boost their state pension are being hit by the controversial "granny tax".

Are baby boomers in their fifties and sixties simply too well-off, perhaps at the expense of those in their twenties and thirties who have glumly watched their living standards stagnate for a decade?

An analysis published by the Financial Times (FT) days before the Budget, which tried to make wealth redistribution a key theme, states: "The living standards of Britons in their twenties have been overtaken by those of their sixty-something grandparents for the first time, with household incomes of pensioners in their seventies and even eighties also catching up rapidly."

When they reach the age of 18, any child in Britain would relish a lump sum of cash to help pay for a degree course, a car, gap year travel, or possibly even a deposit for a home.

That's probably why the Junior Isa savings account is attracting plenty of providers following its launch last November, for UK resident children born on or after January 3, 2011, or before September 1, 2002.

More than five million borrowers are believed to be sitting happily on standard variable rate (SVR) mortgages, which since the credit crunch of 2009 appear to have become an attractive proposition.

Hundreds of thousands of homebuyers have switched to SVR loans at the end of their fixes or trackers as a safe port in a storm, because lenders have been fearful to move their SVRs while the Bank of England base rate remains at its historic low of 0.5%.